A suicide bomber killed himself in an attack on a police van in the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, but neither of the policemen in the vehicle were hurt.

A suicide bomber killed himself in an attack on a police van in the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar on Friday, but neither of the policemen in the vehicle were hurt, police said.

Islamist groups seeking to destabilise the government because of President Pervez Musharraf's alliance with the United States in the war on terrorism are suspected of being behind a wave of attacks in the northwest of the country in in recent weeks.

Later on Friday, a bomb planted in a rubbish bin exploded at bus station in the eastern city of Lahore wounding 14 people, police said. Some of the victims were in a van and some standing nearby.

Lahore police said two people had been killed but the city's police chief, Khawaja Khalid Farooq, later said his men had been mistaken and there were no fatalities in the blast.

There was no claim of responsibility for either of the explosions.

Pakistani security forces inflamed anger among pro-Taliban militant tribesmen in the northwest, in areas bordering Afghanistan, with an airstrike on a religious school at the end of October that killed about 80 suspected militants.

Days later, a suicide attacker detonated a bomb among army recruits on a training ground in a nearby northwestern town, killing 42 of them. It was the bloodiest ever militant strike on Pakistani security forces.

Police said the bomber killed in the Peshawar blast was a 20-year-old man who had been living in the city. His father came to the scene and identified the body, police said. The dead man was said to have been a committed Muslim.

There have been more than half a dozen bombings in Peshawar in recent weeks, including one that killed six people and wounded more than 30 in a crowded market on October 20.